Bishops Urge Prime Minister To Amend Constitution To Benefit Dalit Christians

According to some Church estimates, dalit make up 60 percent of India's 25 million Christians.

JAMSHEDPUR, INDIA (UCAN) - Catholic bishops have urged the Indian prime minister to remove a legal hurdle that deprives marginalized Christians of quotas in education and government jobs.

The Indian Constitution allows quotas in educational institutions and government jobs at the federal level for dalit, members of low castes once considered "untouchable," to help them advance socially and economically.

Christians and Muslims from dalit groups are excluded from these benefits, however, on the ground that their religions reject the caste system. The Sanskrit term dalit means "trampled upon" or "broken open."

Church groups consider such a stand discriminatory and have demanded its removal since 1950, when dalit who were not Hindus lost their constitutional concessions after a presidential order limited quota benefits only to Hindus. The order was amended in 1956 to include dalit Sikhs and in 1990 to include dalit Buddhists, although neither of these religions accepts the caste system.

The bishops renewed this demand at the Feb. 13-20 plenary meeting of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, held in Jamshedpur, 1,300 kilometers southeast of New Delhi.

On Feb. 19, they endorsed a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, asking him to end the discrimination through a presidential order. It also asked Singh to introduce a bill in the next session of parliament to amend the constitution accordingly.

Cardinal Telesphore Toppo of Ranchi, outgoing conference president, and Archbishop Stanislaus Fernandes of Gandhinagar, conference secretary general, signed the memorandum.

In it the bishops said the government's "inordinate delay" in removing "the grave discrimination" has dismayed all Christians in the country. They asserted that the discrimination is "a gross violation of human rights and freedom of religion" that the constitution upholds.

Various federal commissions that studied the matter have recommended including Christians and Muslims in the statutory benefits, the memorandum reminds the prime minister. It also points out that a commission he appointed to study dalit Christians' social, economic and educational backwardness has recommended delinking religion from the provision of benefits.

Another federal body, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, has also recommended incorporating dalit Christians in the Scheduled Caste list.

The bishops claimed most political parties, including the prime minister's Congress party, have backed the Christian demand. Furthermore, most members of parliament across parties have supported the inclusion of dalit Christians in the Scheduled Caste list, says the memorandum, which was to be sent soon after it was signed.

"We strongly feel that we have adequate consensus among political parties to extend Scheduled Caste status to dalit Christians," the bishops stated.

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The Congress party in 2004 promised a policy to extend reservations to "the economically deprived persons belonging to communities that are at present not entitled to such reservations." Two years later, the Congress-led federal coalition government said the Cabinet had agreed to extend Scheduled Caste privileges to Christian converts from low-caste groups, but nothing came of this.

Meanwhile, in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, state chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy has said his government "fully supports" the Christian community's demand for its dalit members. In his Feb. 9 letter to Sonia Gandhi, Congress president and chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance that runs the federal government, Reddy noted that "the issue has been pending for a long time."

Copies of Reddy's letter were distributed among the bishops. The chief minister said the issue has assumed "greater importance at this juncture" and it is appropriate to keep religion out of the provision, as with privileges for tribal people.

According to some Church estimates, dalit make up 60 percent of India's 25 million Christians.

The 2001 national census estimated that Hindus formed 80.5 percent of India's 1.02 billion people. Muslims and Christians, at 13.4 percent and 2.3 percent of the population, respectively, formed the largest religious minority communities. Next came Sikhs, at 1.9 percent, and Buddhists, at 0.8 percent.

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Republished by Catholic Online with permission of the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News), the world's largest Asian church news agency (www.ucanews.com).